This blog is devoted to evaluating vulnerable Democratic candidates, political news, law and current affairs. Author is a Political consultant specializing in opposition research for conservative candidates, attorneys and PACS at the local, state, and federal level.
“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”
― Patrick Henry

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Monday, June 25, 2012

Wayne Allan Root
is a former Libertarian Vice-Presidential nominee and a Las Vegas
oddsmaker. Root states up front that he won’t vote for either Obama or
Romney. Being a Libertarian, his first choice is Ron Paul, but since
Paul is not running as a third-party candidate, Root’s going to vote for
Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson. Even so, Root thinks
Romney will win in a landslide.

He presents some interesting historical facts that he says point to
“a resounding Romney victory.” In 1980, Root points out, “Reagan was
losing by 9 points to Carter. Romney is right now running even in
polls.” Root offers the following on popular voting blocks to back up his landslide claim:

With the Court expected to announce the health care decision sometime
this week – possibly as soon as today – the challenge to the Affordable
Care Act continues to dominate the weekend’s coverage.
General coverage of the case comes from NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and McClatchy Newspapers. Predictions about the Court’s ruling come from Douglas Kmiec at America magazine and Walter Dellinger at Slate. The Wall Street Journal reports on the atmosphere in the nation’s capital, while the Associated Press previews possible reactions to the ruling from the Romney and Obama campaigns. The Washington Post and the New York Times both report on the federal government’s legal strategy in the case (as well as criticism of that strategy), while the Associated Press and Jack Goldsmith (writing for the New Republic) discuss
the secrecy that the Court has maintained throughout the proceedings.
Stories that focus on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli appear in the Washington Post and the ABA Journal; the New York Times discusses President Obama’s wait for a decision. Finally, Reuters
reports on a new poll indicating that most Americans oppose the
Affordable Care Act even though they strongly support most of its
provisions.

As an opposition researcher I am often asked by students, politicians and journalists "What areas of oppo are often overlooked in researching your opponent". My first response is Understanding the law. In many cases I've worked red flags have been raised simply by the fact that I uncovered campaign finance laws were violated. I highly recommend anyone looking to become an oppo or to understand what we do, Understand the law. Especially campaign finance law. You will almost always uncover violations or perhaps inconsistencies in your opponents legal methods. Many violations occur by complete mistake. But not knowing is no excuse. I also highly recommend that if you are not an attorney, team up with an experienced election lawyer. I just ran across this book on Amazon by Antonin Scalia and can't wait to get my hands on it. You don't have to be an attorney to become an oppo, but a good working knowledge of the law can trigger violations. Of course, you should always consult an attorney for verification sake. In a lot of campaigns I've worked, a sledgehammer was not enough. It took a wrecking Ball. That usually comes when your opponent violated the law, knowingly or unknowingly. This book may be a great start to understanding how to read the nebulous world of law!!

In this groundbreaking book by best-selling authors Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation are systematically explained in an engaging and informative style-including several hundred illustrations from actual cases. Never before has legal interpretation been so fascinatingly explained. Both authors are individually renowned for their scintillating prose styles, and together they make even the seemingly dry subject of legal interpretation riveting. Though intended primarily for judges and the lawyers who appear before them to argue the meaning of texts, Reading Law is sound educational reading for anyone who seeks to understand how judges decide cases-or should decide cases. The book is a superb introduction to modern judicial decision-making. Justice Scalia, with 25 years of experience on the Supreme Court, is the foremost expositor of textualism in the world today. Bryan A. Garner, as editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary and author of Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, is the most renowned expert on the language of the law. Reading Law is an essential guide to anyone who wishes to prevail in a legal argument-based on a constitution, a statute, or a contract. The book is calculated to promote valid interpretations: if you have lame arguments, you'll deplore the book; if you have strong arguments, you'll exalt it. But whatever your position, you'll think about law more clearly than ever before.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has an interesting column
describing some of President Obama’s evolving positions on executive
power. He now engages in many of the same practices that he and numerous
other liberal Democrats denounced as unconstitutional in the days of
the Bush Administration:

When George W. Bush was president of the United States,
it was an article of faith among liberals that many of his policies were
not just misguided but unconstitutional as well….
Obama campaigned as a consistent critic of the Bush administration’s
understanding of executive power — and a critic with a background in
constitutional law, no less. But apart from his disavowal of
waterboarding (an interrogation practice the Bush White House had
already abandoned), almost the entire Bush-era wartime architecture has
endured: rendition is still with us, the Guantánamo detention center is
still open, drone strikes have escalated dramatically, and the Obama
White House has claimed the right — and, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki,
followed through on it — to assassinate American citizens without
trial.
These moves have met some principled opposition from the left. But
the president’s liberal critics are usually academics, journalists and
(occasionally) cable-TV hosts, with no real mass constituency behind
them.
The majority of Democrats, polls suggest, have followed roughly the
same path as the former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, a staunch
critic of Bush’s wartime policies who now serves as a legal adviser to
the State Department, supplying constitutional justifications for
Obama’s drone campaigns. What was outrageous under a Republican has
become executive branch business-as-usual under a Democrat.

Douthat does not mention what was perhaps Obama’s biggest reversal on executive power. The man who in 2007
wrote that “[t]he President does not have power under the Constitution
to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not
involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” last year
waged a war against Libya without any congressional authorization. Even Bush never went that far.
Like Douthat, I don’t believe that all of Obama’s reversals were for
the worse. In some of these cases, I think the president’s new position
is more correct than his old one. That said, it is unfortunate that
Obama has adopted such an extraordinarily broad view of executive power,
and that Democratic partisans have largely accepted it. In fairness,
their unprincipled behavior is little different from that of many
Republicans when the GOP controls the White House. But that hardly
justifies it.
For those who want to argue that I myself only turned against a broad
view of executive power when Obama got into the White House, I refer
you to my January 2007 Federalist Society debate on wartime executive power with John Yoo and others, and this post.

UPDATE: I have revised the last paragraph of this post for stylistic reasons.

(THE HILL) A social commerce platform wants to bring campaign fundraising to tweeting.
Chirpify opened up their platform to political campaigns on Tuesday,
in a move that would allow campaigns to accept donations through the
microblogging website. The company also announced that 25 Senate and
House candidates, who will make their own separate announcements, have
already committed to use the service this year in their campaigns.
Chirpify, which has worked mainly with small business owners including
independent musicians in the past, works by inviting users to sign up
for an account, where they will supply their credit card information
through PayPal, then allowing them to tweet the word “donate” with the
candidate and amount they want to send. The company takes a 4 percent
fee per contribution.

The presidential candidates have yet to sign up for the service, so
for now donations can be pledged but not actually sent to the campaigns.
Chirpify is aggressively reaching out to both President Obama and Mitt
Romney to sign up for their service. The amount pledged so far can be
tracked at TweetElection.
The company has set up the opportunity as an alternative to super-PAC
fundraising, a bid to individual donors who typically give under $250.
That is a donor base the Obama campaign has tapped in the past and
widely touts for their support, but of course super-PACs can give
unlimited money, without immediate disclosure, and individuals cannot.

“There are hundreds of millions of dollars being raised for U.S.
political campaigns every year, and an estimated 140 million Twitter
users,” Chirpify Chief Executive and founder Chris Teso said in a
statement. “Yet until now, there was no way to directly exchange
currency on Twitter.”

The use of Twitter for fundraising illustrates the way technology is
changing campaigns this year. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) also
approved the use of text messaging to send donations to political
candidates last week.

Unless the Supreme Court decides to eliminate the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in its entirety, Florida v. Sebelius
is not the end of health care reform litigation, but only the
beginning. Lawsuits are already pending challenging everything from the
contraception mandate to the black lung benefits provisions to the
structure of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, as Reuters reported last week. More will follow.

In tomorrow’s USA Today, Cato’s Michael Cannon and I discuss
another potential lawsuit that will be filed if the health care law
survives: A challenge to the IRS rule providing tax credits and premium
assistance for qualifiying health insurance plans sold on federally run
exchanges. As I noted here and here,
the text of the PPACA only authorizes tax credits and premium
assistance for insurance plans purchased in state-run exchanges. If a
state refuses to create an exchange, the federal government is supposed
to create a “fallback” exchange, but the law does not provide for tax
credits and premium assistance for insurance plans purchased on these
“fallback” exchanges. The IRS rule tries to fix this by rewriting the
statute, without any textual warrant. I discussed the rule in this Cato video.

The very short version:
President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a campaign speech on
Monday, in the town of Durham, NH. This will cost the town an estimated sixteen to thirty
thousand dollars in additional overtime for cops and fire officials and
whatnot. The town is taking the position that while they’d be happy to
eat the cost for a Presidential visit, a campaign stop by the President is a different story;
the town also claims that they’ve asked previous campaigns to foot the
bill for overtime/costs. Obama for America has declined to do this,
claiming that the Secret Service wants the extra security in place (this
is fast becoming OfA’s favorite excuse for bad visuals); the town is now contemplating symbolically dis-inviting the President. If passed, then hi-jinks will then presumably ensue.

No, really, that was the really short version.

Let’s break this down into several parts. First, the merits… well,
how much merit Durham’s claim has depends on how you look at it, and
whether the town really has made a distinction between
campaign and official stops. It’s also in some ways the most irrelevant
part of the problem facing Obama for America right now… and likely to be
the one that they myopically fixate upon, bless their hearts. Because
the second problem for the Democrats is how this looks. This
isn’t 2008. The country doesn’t feel as rich as it did. Particularly
since Obama hit Mitt Romney a couple of weeks ago with a campaign ad accusing Mitt Romney of… not wanting to pay for firemen and cops.
Oops.

Anyway, the point here is that a thirty grand overtime bill is not
exactly a hill that you’d expect Obama for America to die on; regardless
of the relative merits, the optics are sufficiently poor that it’ll probably cost them more than thirty grand’s worth of headaches. It is, in fact, the sort of thing that campaign money is for;
making problems go away that might otherwise stomp on the smooth
delivery of a campaign’s message. The Obama campaign really should have
just smiled tightly, and paid up. Unless… they’re, you know, feeling the pinch
these days. To the point where thirty grand looks as much like real
money to them as it does to most of the people reading this article.

On March 23, 2011, Obama lied to the American people about Operation
Fast and Furious. He said that neither he nor Attorney General Holder
authorized the effort to arm the drug cartels in Mexico.
Several
weeks later, on May 3, Holder lied to Congress. He said he did not know
who approved Fast and Furious. He also lied when he said he "probably
heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few
weeks."

In fact, as the video proves, the Obama administration and
the Department of Justice were deeply involved in the operation from the
start

According to a Washington Post investigation relying on data from OpenSecrets.org,
130 members of Congress or their families traded hundreds of millions
of dollars in stock in companies lobbying on legislation that came
before their committees.

The lawmakers -- about
evenly split between Democrats and Republicans -- bought and sold stock
totaling between $85 million and $218 million in 323 companies
registered to lobby on bills that were passing through committee or were
still pending before the full Congress, the Post found. The trades
occurred between 2007 and 2010.

By Gene Wexler
JACKSONVILLE, FLA. —
Florida Represenative Connie Mack tells Jacksonville's Morning News that the Supreme Court's soon-to-be-announced ruling on President Obama's health care law will be big in his race against Senator Bill Nelson.
"He has supported Barack Obama ninety-eight percent of the time," Mack said. "That's astonishing frankly."
Mack says the people of Florida are upset that Sen. Nelson has constantly supported President Obama, adding that he was one of the Senators who tried to get a "special deal" in the health care law.

Few politicians have risen to national prominence
as quickly as Marco Rubio. At age forty-one he’s the subject of
widespread interest and speculation. But he has never before told the
full story of his unlikely journey, with all the twists and turns that
made him an American son.
That journey began when his parents
first left Cuba in 1956. After Fidel Castro solidified his Communist
grip on power, Mario and Oria Rubio could never again return to their
homeland. But they embraced their new country and taught their children
to appreciate its unique opportunities. Every sacrifice they made over
the years, as they worked hard at blue-collar jobs in Miami and Las
Vegas, was for their children.
As a boy, Rubio spent countless
hours with his grandfather, discussing history and current events.
“Papa” loved being Cuban, but he also loved America for being a beacon
of liberty to oppressed people around the world. As Rubio puts it, “My
grandfather didn’t know America was exceptional because he read about it
in a book. He lived it and saw it with his own eyes.”

Devastated
after his grandfather’s death, Rubio was getting poor grades and
struggled to fit in at his high school, where some classmates mocked him
as “too American.” But then he buckled down for college
and law school, driven by his twin passions for football and politics.
He played football at a small college in Mis­souri, then came back to
Florida to attend Santa Fe Community College and the University of
Florida. He went on to earn his law degree from the University of Miami and took a job at a law firm, which paid him a handsome salary that allowed his father to retire.

As
a young attorney he ran for the West Miami City Commission, a role that
led to the Florida House of Representatives. In just six years he rose
to Speaker of the House and became a leading advocate for free
enter­prise, better schools,
limited government, and a fairer, simpler tax system. He found that he
could connect with people across party lines while still upholding
conserva­tive values.

His U.S. Senate campaign started as an
extreme long shot against Florida’s popular incumbent governor, Charlie
Crist. Undaunted by the early poll numbers and the time away from his
wife and kids, Rubio traveled the state with his message of empowerment
and optimism. He upset Crist in both the primary and a dramatic
three-way general election, after Crist quit the GOP to run as an
independent.

Now Rubio speaks on the national stage about the
challenges we face and the better future that’s possible if we return to
our founding principles. As he puts it, “Conservatism is not about
leaving people behind. Con­servatism is about allowing people to catch
up.”

In that vision, as in his family’s story, Rubio proves that the American Dream is still alive for those who pur­sue it.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Barack Obama was neither qualified nor prepared for the presidency, and it's showing.
Recent events seem to reinforce that view. Mr. Obama’s economy is failing. Our country’s secrets are being leaked onto the front pages of left-wing papers. And our esteemed president either doesn’t have a firm grasp of the limits of his power as outlined in the Constitution even after three years in office, or doesn’t care that he is violating those limits.
President Obama just decided he has the power to rewrite U.S. immigration policy all by himself. But a couple of years back, the president claimed he didn’t have that authority: “I just have to continue to say, this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. We are doing everything we can administratively. But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce.”

The new issue of Election Law Journal is out now. It
features a symposium on Election Law in India, the world’s largest
democracy, guest co-edited by Robert Moog and David Gilmartin of North
Carolina State University. The symposium includes an article by Ellen Weintraub and Samuel Brown comparing campaign finance disclosure in India and the U.S. The table of contents appears below.

This is our first issue devoted to another country’s election system,
part of our effort to enhance the journal’s international coverage. In
that same vein, we’ve added Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland Law School as our International Editor, a new position for this issue.

Our next issue (11:3) will include articles by Donald Green, Melissa
Michelson, Neil Malhotra, Andrew Healy, Allison Sovey Carnegie, and Ali
Valenzuela; Bob Stein and Greg Vonnahme; Anthony Fowler,
Conor Dowling, Ryan Enos, and Costas Panagopoulos; and Sarah Murray. It
also includes a paper on Florida’s recent early voting changes by Dan
Smith and Michael Herron, and book reviews by Dan Ortiz and Zim Nwokora.

ELJ 11:2 – Table of Contents
The Party Line: Election Law Goes Global, by Daniel P. Tokaji and Paul GronkeSymposium: Election Law in India
Introduction to “Election Law in India,” by David Gilmartin and Robert Moog
Between Moral Force and Supplementary Legality: A Model Code of
Conduct and the Election Commission of India, by Ujjwal Kumar Singh
Identifying Citizens: Electoral Rolls, the Right to Vote, and the Election Commission of India, by Anupama Roy
The Election Commission of India and the Regulation and Administration of Electoral Politics, by Alistair McMillan
A Seat at the Table: Reservations and Representation in India’s Electoral System, by Wendy Singer
Identifying Criminals and Crorepatis in Indian Politics: An Analysis of Two Supreme Court Rulings, by Ronojoy Sen
Reforming India’s Party Financing and Election Expenditure Laws, by M. V. Rajeev Gowda and E. Sridharan
Following the Money: Campaign Finance Disclosure in India and the United States, by Ellen L. Weintraub andSamuel C. Brown

Book Reviews

A Study of Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United
States and Canada, by Mark Rush (reviewing Robert Boatright, Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States and Canada)

Diagnosing Delicate Systems: A Review of Three Books, by Kelly McNicholas (reviewing David M. Farrell, Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction, Alan Renwick, The Politics of Electoral Reform, and Andrew Reynolds, Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World).

The
Empowered Man—which shows President Obama watching in horror as a
thirty something white male, standing in front of the White House holds
up the U.S. constitution in one hand and a wad of cash in the other—was
released this week.

“I wanted this painting to reflect the hope
many Americans are having that we can steer our country back on track,”
McNaughton emailed BuzzFeed. “I used real models and it took a couple of
months to paint.”

An article last week in Investors.com entitled, “CNN Turns Blind Eye to Obama-Alinsky Ties”
turns the spotlight on Main Stream Media’s latest attempt to exculpate
Barack Obama from his sketchy past. In the article, the author points
out that CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien hosted a segment that attempted to
put some daylight between President Obama, and community agitator Saul
Alinsky. Obama’s links to Alinsky are unmistakable to anyone looking
with an open mind, but O’Brien managed to conclude that Newt Gingrich
was out of line when he said, “[President Obama] will represent Saul
Alinsky (and) European socialism”. In fact, O’Brien’s astounding
conclusion was that “President Obama has never said that he was influenced by Alinsky”.

The gun-walking tactics in Fast and Furious turned up in
earlier ATF cases, during the Bush administration. When they were
uncovered by Justice officials in the Obama administration, a top
Justice official raised concerns with ATF officials, according to
Justice documents released last year. But the officials never alerted
Mr. Holder, didn’t do enough to prevent similar cases and weren’t aware
the operation was under way until months later, according to Justice
documents.
Mr. Holder, in a letter last week to Mr. Issa, said, “The record in
this matter reflects that until allegations about the inappropriate
tactics used in Fast and Furious were made public, department leadership
was unaware of those tactics.”

On November 4, 2008, as it become obvious that Barack Hussein Obama would defeat John Sidney McCain and become the nation’s forty-fourth president, I told readers at my home blog to “Say hello to the Punk Presidency.”

That moniker came not from whim but from study. By Election Day in
2008, the question was no longer whether our new president was a punk.
It was only whether he would only fit the word’s relatively benign
definition as a “young, inexperienced person” or would be much worse than that, namely a “petty criminal or hoodlum”
whose administration would abuse its awesome power and access to the
treasures of the richest and greatest country on earth in ways
previously unseen.

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of
openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public
trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and
collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote
efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

The White House on Friday rebuked two visitors who were
photographed last week at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue flipping the middle
finger below a portrait of the late President Ronald Reagan.
The guests had been invited to a reception last Friday marking gay
pride month. The images of them -- with both middle fingers raised,
pointing up toward Reagan -- were first published by Philadelphia Magazine.
The White House did not approve.
"While the White House does not control the conduct of guests at
receptions, we certainly expect that all attendees conduct themselves in
a respectful manner. Most all do," Shin Inouye, a White House
spokesman, said. "These individuals clearly did not. Behavior like this
doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in the White House."
Photographer Zoe Strauss and Matty Hart, national director for public
engagement at the group Solutions for Progress, had posted the images
of themselves to Facebook.
Hart, under his, wrote simply: "F--- Reagan."
He later posted a link on his Facebook page to the Philadelphia Magazine piece about their gesture.
Neither Strauss nor Hart have responded to FoxNews.com for comment.
Hart, though, defended his gesture in the Philadelphia Magazine
article. "Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands," he said. "The man was
in the White House as AIDS exploded."
Hart said he doesn't care if he's not invited back to the White House.
A third guest, Philadelphia publisher Mark Segal, was also
photographed next to George W. Bush's portrait, but used a more tasteful
thumbs-up in his picture. He told Philadelphia Magazine he has friends
in the White House and "I'm not going to do something that could
embarrass them."

Are you seriously kidding me?? Obama released his event registry via the link below.

It goes like this:

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?
Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift.
It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a
gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy
bowl.
Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy—so get started today.

And the crazy thing is Liberaltards will actually do it!! I realize this guy wants to control almost every aspect of our lives, but this is beyond comprehension. This is a sure sign of desperation amongst the Obama campaign or perhaps a prelude to the dictatorship if this bumbling fool is elected to a second term.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Two years after President Obama declared the "Recovery Summer," the unemployment rate remains above 8% and more than 23 million Americans are out of work or underemployed. And President Obama claims the private sector is "doing fine." We deserve better and a President who understands.

DOJ Press Release:
” WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice announced today that it has
filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida and the Florida Secretary
of State in his official capacity alleging that the state has violated
its obligations under Section 8 of the National Voter

Registration
Act of 1993 (NVRA). The complaint, filed today in the U.S. District
Court for the Northern District of Florida, alleges that Florida has
violated the NVRA by conducting a systematic program to purge voters
from its voter registration rolls within the 90-day quiet period before
an election for federal office established by the law. In addition, the complaint
alleges that Florida’s use of inaccurate and unreliable voter
verification procedures violates the requirement in Section 8 of the
NVRA that any such program be uniform and nondiscriminatory.”

Sometimes you post things on twitter or facebook and immediately figure out it was a mistake or maybe as in the case of Rep. Weiner you may post a picture of your schlong in regret. Well you can delete it right? Sure but this new site

Politiwoops will capture what politicians say and save them before they are deleted. Check it out!!

Sure, we all tweet things we don't mean to share, but now politicians have no way to hide them. Discover tweets that your politicians shared and then promptly deleted.

That's our wonderful Senator Bill Nelson stating "the underlying bill rewards the banks and leaves the little person with the short end of the stick, and that is not right." Oh really??? Let me ask you this Bill? How is your new $700,000 condo you got in a short sale??? Nelson you didn't even want the mortgage crisis to be fixed.

This bill sends a message to Wall Street that if they
play fast and loose in the name of short-term profits, the Government
will actually make up for their losses. And the bill does very little to
help individual homeowners. Until we stabilize the housing market,
which is the underlying ability to restructure the economy from this
crisis--until we stabilize the housing market, and until we stem the
record number of foreclosures, our market simply is not going to
improve. While this bill authorizes the Treasury to develop and carry
out a plan, it does not require financial institutions participating in
the program to modify or refinance any loan. It only requires the
Treasury to encourage loan modifications. Voluntary refinancing efforts
will not solve our foreclosure crisis. We should mandate these efforts.
We should start by requiring Fannie and Freddie to refinance the
mortgages they hold on their books.

Florida Democratic senator nabs condo on the cheap from major campaign donor (Updated)

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson cashed in on Florida’s foreclosure crisis, purchasing a lavish $1 million golf course condominium from a major donor on the cheap.

County real estate records reveal that in November 2011 Nelson purchased a 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom condo at 10339 Kensington Shore Drive for $717,800—$350,000 less than the condo’s $1.07 million value.

The property was owned by Issa Homes, which is run by Francis Issa, a longtime Nelson contributor.

Issa and his wife Michelle have given nearly $14,000 to Nelson since 2005 and offered to host a fundraiser for the senator’s reelection campaign in September 2011, two months before Nelson purchased the condo.

The event fell through due to low attendance.

“Its value, like real estate all across Florida, declined after the housing market crash—and after this condo sat empty for a lengthy period of time. In fact, it had never been lived in,” Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin said. “The price Nelson and his wife paid was almost exactly the same amount paid by someone from Pennsylvania—who bought the same size unit across the hall in the same building in the very same month.”

The neighboring unit was purchased three weeks after Nelson finalized the deal for $725,000—$2 more per square foot than Nelson’s condo.

Issa, who has also given more than $100,000 to Democratic candidates and party committees, insisted that he was not involved in the sale, nor has he spoken directly to Nelson in three years.

“We had about 8 units that we couldn’t sell for two years, and the bank agreed to put out a short sale,” he said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. “I had nothing to do with the sale; it was handled by the Nona Lakes marketing department.”

McLaughlin said in a phone interview that the senator “never spoke directly to Issa about the property,” but hung up when the Washington Free Beacon asked additional questions about Nelson’s relationship with the donor.

Lake Nona is an exclusive golfing community in the Orlando area. Nelson’s condo includes membership to the course, which is valued at about $80,000—11 percent of his purchase price. Similar units in Nelson’s building were priced as high as $1.5 million in 2008, but the collapse of the housing market in Florida—which had the 7th highest foreclosure rate in the nation at the time of Nelson’s purchase—allowed Nelson to get the property at a low price.

“We spent two years trying to sell before SunTrust [bank] told us to offload them,” said Issa, who could not recall if he ever mentioned the property to Nelson in private conversation. “It was all handled by the contractors.”

SunTrust Bank’s Florida PAC has given $8,500 to Nelson since 2005.

Several Senate Democrats have been caught up in controversy over property transactions involving donors. Chris Dodd withdrew from his 2010 Connecticut Senate race after it was revealed that he had accepted sweetheart loan deals with mortgage writer Countrywide—a major campaign donor that played a large role in the economic crisis.

Issa said he might sit this election out after souring on Democrats over Super PACs.

“Everyone knows politicians pay homage to the guys who pay for campaign advertisements,” he said. “We should outlaw PACs—it’s gotten out of control since Citizens United. It’s disgusting.”

Is this guy for real. And Issa? Lying. This guy has done several mortgages for Nelson in the past. Florida do yourself a favor and vote for Connie Mack and get this Crusty, lying, opportunist out of the Senate.

The Prosecution Complex is at it again. How dare anyone criticize a Prosecutor!! I won't, I'll just perform some oppo on all of them and expose their hypocrisy from their own words and actions.

From PJ Media:

I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that Harvard is not liable in any way for anything Prof. Alan Dershowitz says about another public figure. He has freedom of speech plus academic freedom plus he’s more than a bit of a media whore, and expecting him not to opine on a major case like the Zimmerman/Martin shooting is tantamount to expecting the sun not to rise in the east. Dershowitz will opine, and he will be brutal. It’s what he does. In this case, he has savaged the prosecution’s case, calling it unethical among other things. Right or not, he has every right to say these things.

I bring up the fact that I’m not a lawyer but I do grok Dershowitz’s freedom to opine mainly to point out that non-lawyers easily grasp major concepts of free speech and realize at a glance just how difficult it is for public figures to claim they have been libeled or slandered. The bar in such accusations is quite high. Almost impossible. And his employer isn’t liable even if Dershowitz is guilty of something or lies through his teeth, which he isn’t and hasn’t done. Florida state’s attorney Angela Corey, the lawyer tasked with prosecuting George Zimmerman, she does not get this despite the fact that she is a lawyer. So she reportedly called up Harvard University to threaten it into muzzling Dershowitz.

State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions.
She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40-minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.
She said that because I work for Harvard and am identified as a professor she had the right to sue Harvard.When the communications official explained to her that I have a right to express my opinion as “a matter of academic freedom,” and that Harvard has no control over what I say, she did not seem to understand.

That’s because, based on the evidence of her affidavit against George Zimmerman and now this call to Harvard, Angela Corey is not very smart. She doesn’t know the law and is overmatched in dealing with Alan Dershowitz. These are not opinions, they are facts.

I’ll be waiting for Corey to ring up PJM HQ threatening to sue because of this post. Bring it. Hopefully we’ll record the conversation.

Monday, June 4, 2012

A leftist is someone who believes that we need to see housing prices increase, but if a rich man buys another house, he's bad.

A leftist is someone who believes that we need pension funds to be available to everyone in the economy, but that the people who manage investments are bad.

A leftist is someone who believes that we need to base our entire economy on consumption and not productivity -- and then turns around and blasts America for being too greedy and materialistic.

A leftist is someone who believes that the rich should pay their "fair share", but that that "fair" doesn't mean the same amount, the same rate, or anything remotely close to equality.

A leftist is someone who believes that democracy is wonderful, but doesn't want to make sure that it's the people who are doing the voting, and not just political cronies.

A leftist is someone who protests against police brutality as a general rule, but believes that only the police should have guns.

A leftist is someone who believes we're all just animals, that we should leave nature alone, but at the same time believes that we should heavily regulate human activity. It's anti-humanism.

Leftism is not a philosophy that is just a little slip up. It is fundamentally wrong and contradictory. It cannot be rational. It is a flawed approach to economics, society, relationships, wealth, and almost everything else.

Leftism is a broken shell of a philosophy and the world must reject it or face the consequences

History usually repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing that re-enactment with your own eyes. In 1978, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people rid themselves of their Marxist dictatorship, carefully disguised as socialism. Thirty years later I witnessed how the same Marxism, camouflaged as socialism, began infecting the shores of my adoptive country, the United States, which had just won a 44-year Cold War against Marxism and against its earthly incarnation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In a 2008 column titled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway,” Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Action Commission of the Communist Party USA, strongly endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, appealing to all working people in the United States to back Senator Barack Obama, in order to provide “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.”

Election Year 2012 comes with an added twist that political prognosticators throughout the country are focused on: a June gubernatorial recall election that almost perfectly encapsulates the national concerns for November. In an interview from the campaign trail over the weekend, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch addressed some of the implications of whatever happens on Tuesday.

Taxpayers in Wisconsin have been forced to spend millions of dollars to redo a decisive election simply because Big Labor was threatened by policy decisions that it never thought any administration would have the guts to fight for. Many see this as a violation of, if not the law as written, the spirit of the recall process. If Big Labor prevails in this fight, recall might very well become the featured weapon in its arsenal. In fact, Lt. Gov. Kleefisch said that activists have already been sent from Wisconsin to Louisiana to be trained in how to “exact revenge through recall.” This somewhat overlooked aspect of the recall may very well be the most important.

MIAMI (AP) — George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer charged with murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, surrendered to police Sunday and was booked into jail after having his bail revoked two days earlier.

Zimmerman's legal team said in a tweet that he was in police custody. Zimmerman's bail was revoked because the judge said he and his wife lied to the court about their finances so he could obtain a lower bond.

On Sunday afternoon, about 40 minutes before the 2:30 p.m. deadline to surrender, Zimmerman was listed as an inmate on the jail website. He was listed as being held without bail and having $500 in his jail account.

Prosecutors had said Zimmerman and his wife told the judge at a bond hearing in April that they had limited money, even though he had raised about $135,000 through a website. Defense attorneys said the matter was a misunderstanding.

Attorney Mark O'Mara announced earlier Sunday on his website that Zimmerman had arrived in Florida late Saturday evening ahead of his surrender. Zimmerman, who is charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of the 17-year-old Martin, was ordered by a judge Friday to return to jail.

Quotes

"If it's smart to look at the Carfax history of a used car before buying it, why should anyone object to discovering the history of politicians before electing them to serve you?" Stephen Marks

"I believe that public office is the noblest of professions, but I also believe we must hold public officials accountable. Exposing the full truth about them-the good and the bad-ultimately makes for better-educated voters and a stronger democracy." Stephen Marks in Politics Magazine.